So Long …

I decided to take this year-end opportunity to say good bye for a while. It’s with some regret that I hang up my blogging hat for now. My next year is going to extraordinarily busy, as I take on the role of President of AACC. As much as I have enjoyed writing posts to this blog for the last 2 ½ years, I’m afraid blogging routinely will have to take a back seat for 2016. I do hope to get an occasional post in, but we’ll see.

It has been my distinct pleasure to write posts for Lablogatory. I encourage any of you who have any inclination at all to write about lab related issues, to take up blogging for this feature. Putting your thoughts on paper is one of the best ways I know to clarify those thoughts. Writing about something is somewhat akin to teaching it; doing so helps you to understand and learn it yourself. It has also let me see just how clearly I can express the concepts I’m trying to get across.

Another thing that blogging has clearly taught me is to be sure of my facts. Seeing something in writing always gives it so much more weight than simply hearing it. I have always been surprised by the number of things that I “know” to be fact from my laboratory years of experience, that I cannot find backing or literature support for. Thus when I’m blogging about a topic, I often find myself suddenly questioning, exploring and confirming things that I’ve always assumed were “fact”. And if I can’t find supporting references, I clearly express that it is an opinion and where that opinion arises from.

And lastly, writing posts for this blog has allowed me to interact with a wide variety of people I would not have met otherwise, starting with Kelly Swails, who often tweaked my posts into something better, and continuing on with people who have responded, both online, and in person. Even one of my hospital administrators in Risk Management stopped me one day in the hall to say, “Oh! I read your blog about dilutions!”

Posting articles for this blog has given me the opportunity to think about a variety of topics, to clarify my thoughts by putting them into writing, and to interact with some great people. I hope to be able to pick this back up after my term of office. In the meantime, many thanks to everyone who has read my posts. See y’all on the other side!

-Patti Jones PhD, DABCC, FACB, is the Clinical Director of the Chemistry and Metabolic Disease Laboratories at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, TX and a Professor of Pathology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.